


Not in the Spirit of Things

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Genre: Gen, I think too much about old movies, Non-Graphic Violence, off-screen violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:26:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Halloween Town was a little different when Oogie Boogie ruled.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not in the Spirit of Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarlingGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlingGirl/gifts).



Halloween Town was a little different when Oogie Boogie ruled.

It wasn’t that they didn’t scare people in those days; quite the opposite. Those were the days when horror and terror stalked through the world once a year, and even back home, one malicious thought could have rather more permanent consequences. Their Halloweens were a time of hacked limbs and bloody teeth and the killers waiting at the alleyways and the hands which dragged you deep into the shadows. Halloweens when people locked their doors, secured them with both locks and prayers, telling tales of the Devil abroad as if that would keep Him out.

Oogie’s motto has never changed, be it as king or prisoner: _It’s much more fun, I think you’ll find, when lives are on the line._

To be fair, Jack Skellington had mused, once their little war was over and the Earth’s Boogeyman had become their own as well, Oogey’s approach was still the business of fear. Yet it simply hadn’t felt right to him. It spoiled the season for everyone; it took the joke too far. Besides which – and here was where his real complaint had lain – torturing and taking people’s lives was simply unoriginal.

There were hundreds, thousands, millions of ways to make someone scream. Gore and death were a niche, and one that poisoned everybody’s creativity.

When he focuses – when he wants to – he recalls when he had first arrived in Halloween Town, blinking and with nothing but an odd foggy recollection of a place beforehand. He’d been delighted with the sights and the sounds, the people, the ghouls, the mere idea of it all; yet he’d quickly grown tired, then quickly disgusted with the order of the day. Blood and traps, bugs and death. Deep inside his bones, he’d known that there was more to Halloween than this; more than that, he’d known that the narrow-minded approach was ruining everything.

Jack’s talent has always been his ideas. Without so much as a speck of creativity, his world quickly grows dull. That, after all, had been his principal complaint before his encounter with Christmas and reminder that no matter how many different approaches they tried, there were still so many more to be experienced.

Most of Halloween Town doesn’t remember the time before Jack’s rule. Memory isn’t something they’re built for. They are creatures of habit and fear, each with their own little quirks and lives but ultimately the spirits and inhabitants of this town. Halloween happens every year, and this clockwork governs their lives. All that changes is their yearly plans. To them, the moment Jack became the Pumpkin King, that was all he ever had been – just as Oogie Boogie had always been the malevolence out beneath his cabin in the woods. 

Jack can remember if he tries – although why he would want to is anybody’s guess – as can Oogie Boogie, because they are the ones who have ruled this land, and as a result they are the two who can step outside it to see beyond its rather simple magic. 

Funnily enough, in toying with nature as he does, stuffing a doll with autumn leaves and giving it life, Dr Finklestein created a third.

It’s not that Sally is the next ruler of Halloween Town. Granted that she could be, she has enough independent thought for it, but the holiday would just fall apart in her hands. For all that Jack is less murderous than Oogie, his mind is still rigged to think in terms of fear. It’s not a failing, certainly not in his job; but it’s an edge, a ruthlessness, a filter for the world which Sally lacks. Anyway, she wouldn’t want the job if they offered it.

Halloween Town must have a ruler, like all the other lands of holiday. It seems obvious, perhaps, that the Boogeyman himself should take the reins, rather than a skeleton whom everybody knows wanders the mausoleums and pumpkin patches. But if a king falls short and fails his own holiday, then perhaps it is only reasonable that the position be transferable.

Only within reason, though. Jack could take the Halloween crown, but Santa Claus’ would never have sat quite right. For all his charm, he brings a tilted angle to everything – Shakespeare with his own skull, lights on the electric chair. It’s more than most of his fellow residents, but then, that’s rather the point of being in charge.

When he’d first seized the crown – brought down Oogie’s reign of terror and installed his own more original one – he hadn’t wanted to kill the Boogeyman, and not just because it hadn’t been immediately clear how. (Not that it remains obscure, since ideas are Jack’s stock in trade.) Faceless terror still has its own place, and the belief kept him strong, and besides, the whole point had been to stop the bloodshed.

Jack’s ethos might seem questionable to some – shrunken heads fine, melted corpses not so much – but the fact remained that he had found himself wandering in this land, brought himself here and took control, because the spirit of Halloween speaks to him. Christmas reached out in Christmas’ land, except when left to his own devices, Halloween comes to him and not vice versa. 

In the end, he had defeated, and yes, killed Oogie Boogie, because not only had his predecessor not changed a jot, not only had he tried to kill Jack’s friends, but also he remained the same old unoriginal killer he always had been. And Jack remembers enough to know how this sack of worms can corrupt his holiday.

So Halloween is about scares and intricate tricks, the thrill, the rush as you call _who’s there_ and the truths you’ve always suspected – but the restraints still exist. The holiday mustn’t rush out of control, if only because then, then there’s nothing left for anybody but the few sadists who did this.

It shouldn’t be about killing.

Jack Skellington’s Halloweens are full of fear – but, like the best tricksters (and where else would you find them?), he delights in the intricacies of his performance, and when the sun rises on 1st November, he retreats.

If only for another 364 days.

He does, after all, have a holiday to rule.

**Author's Note:**

> I see Jack and Oogie as the two approaches to Halloween: fun versus cruelty.


End file.
